Feb

8

Flexing my muscles a little from my cramped cage…

Filed Under Babbling, Writings/Rants 

I’m the world’s worst English major without a doubt. Uncontested.

From time and time again, I try to find words to express all of these thoughts that I have, and I get a bit pretentious in how I think about things. I can acknowledge that and I well know it, and if that’s my downfall, then so be it. But as a whole, I wish I wrote more.

My problem with writing is that I have a severe perfectionist complex and with that, comes the hatred of editing. Like many folks who toil over what comes from their fingers and keys or pen and paper, I don’t want to go back over it and rewrite it, so I take extra care in the time that I put into writing it in the first place so that I don’t have to revise and edit it. This is why working for a newspaper would never work for me–if an editor gave me back a piece and told me to revise it? I’d tell them to do something that I believe is anatomically impossible. Or if it is, I haven’t tried and have no desire to.

With this comes a problem with picking up the thoughts in my mind from the beginning. I try to start off with various prompts and I have books upon books of them that I keep buying because when I read them in the store, something about them really inspires me and makes me feel “Hmmm, I could write about that.” Then, I get home and they sit on my shelf. I just don’t feel a connection to pick them up and read them, which I should, but I don’t. I’ll flip through them and I’ll like a few of them and others I’ll think “Man, that’s a lame prompt.” I think mainly my issue is that there are things that I want to write about, but I don’t want to write about. Stories that I want to tell, but I don’t want to be known. And because you interject so much of your own life into what you’re writing, I don’t want someone to read one of my stories and go “So is that really what’s in his life?” Yes, I know, Stephen King’s real life isn’t filled with rabid dogs, demonic clowns, and possessed cars, so that means that if I write about cheating, lieing, divorce, and murder it’s not necessarily in my life. But sometimes we unintentionally write characters that might show something we’re not trying to show. I don’t think I’m hiding any secrets from myself, but I think I stifle these voices so I don’t write something and then hurt myself with it later. If that makes sense?

I’ve been trying to be good about writing as a whole, though. I had read an article a while back called “10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day,” which I really liked as a whole, but whenever I re-read it at times like now, I feel like it’s a cheerleader for a game that I’m sitting and watching from the sidelines and waiting for the pretty girls to leave the field because they’re just inane and pointless to the overall game. But, then again, the crowd does help folks get in to it.

See, the problem I have mostly with writing, is that I’ll read a site like McSweeney’s that has these wonderfully written vignettes that seem so absurd and have such a strong voice or I’ll hear songs like some of the new Seven Mary Three songs from day&nightdriving and I know I can do that. And as much as imitation is the highest form of flattery, and imitation in art helps you understand how to do that, I get stuck in my own little ways. I edit things together in fashions that stifles what I’m trying to accomplish, or I write something so contrived and pretentious that I see right through it.

And I’m my own worst critic, like any writer out there. I had done a freewrite the other day that I posted on my MySpace bulletins like a lot of my other freewrites. If you saw it, it was called “feeling like creation…” You can find it if you’re on my friendslist on the bulletin board, otherwise, I’ve got it saved around here if you want a copy, shoot me an e-mail. Needless to say, I received a few very very nice comments from friends about how they liked it. Nothing about why they liked it. And last night when I was re-reading it and working on a paradigm shift on it. Okay, not as much a paradigm shift, but a format shift from prose poetry to lyrical poetry. I consider my freewrites to be prose poetry often. Even still, I couldn’t pull out certain things from it, and when I did, it just didn’t flow right on the paper. Granted, it was about 3am at the time (and like Rob Thomas says, I was feeling lonely), so maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Maybe I should have come back and edited it later.

I had started writing something just before that this morning (around 2:30am) that I’m calling “Grow” for the time being, and looking at it now, 6 hours later, and putting guitar chords to it? I feel like I did something right for a change. And its because I tried to edit, and I didn’t accept the first draft. Oh sure, it was only a word or two here or there, and I rewrote the verses to make them read better and flow better, but it was enough. Revision is like cooking steak: you can do a little (rare), flip some things around and smoothen it out (done), keep the same ideas and completely redo it (well done), or trash it and start over (throw it to the dog and grab a new one and another cold beer from the fridge).

We’ll see how the day progresses. Sometimes, no matter how much I worry and think about writing as the process? It just turns out right in the end.

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    About The Site


    Thanks for stopping by, folks! My name is Adam J. Cohen, and I'm a guitarist/songwriter in Champaign, IL, recently relocated from Orlando, FL where I'm a UCF grad. Here, you'll find vignettes on my life, setlists and show reviews, and whatever else crosses my mind. Enjoy!